If you're a person who makes a living making money in the finance world, I would think you're probably a totally "cool" guy.  You're the life of a party, amazingly handsome, and with the most seductive personality.  After all, isn't that what makes for a great financial analyst?

You're probably a lot like cool video game industry writers who, to the envy of everyone, are so ahead of the times and fixated on every detail of new technology, that regular people just marvel and stare.

Together, you guys are highly qualified for predicting the future of video games for the average video game buyer.  Because the average game buyer is a dork and nerd like you, right?

Wrong.

Welcome to the real world, where video games are becoming mainstream.  It's possible, maybe even probable, that you - the geniuses that you are - rarely actually go out to stores when you can order things from your home.  Why bother with inefficient use of your time, right?

I suppose that means we'll all be ordering food from supermarkets on delivery and also never go to movies anymore, right?  Don't you remember, you said that movie theaters were going to die.

Oh that's right.  They didn't.  You didn't realize that most people are not as rational and technical as you are, not as sophisticated in your way.

And what's your latest prediction?  People are going to download $60 games in mass numbers and forego physical packaging.  Right.  Who wants to go to a dull video game store and interact with anybody?  It's just like $1 music downloads replacing CDs, right?

Wrong.

People love physical game packaging.  If you were to go out and notice the fresh air for a moment (I tried this the other day), you would find a world where people go to the stores and put down their money in order to walk out with a grin on their face and the latest cool looking game in their hands.

Wake up nerds and geeks!  The world does not just dramatically change based on a perfect efficiency model in your head.  If Apple products were high quality bad looking products, they would not sell.  If video games were all digital, they would not sell either.  People would discover parks, and bowling alleys, and batting cages.  The whole video game industry would collapse, according to your idealistic images of the 'super digital world,' where physical packaging is a thing of the past.

In case you haven't noticed, $1 digital downloads (which is only 1/60th of the price of a retail video game) have effectively killed a very large part of the music business.  That's because even $1 is too much of a price to pay for something that is not physical, for a lot of people.  That's why they're still downloading illegally by a factor of over 10 to 1 today.

Physical packaging is a part of the sales process and only the most hardcore of gamers do not fall for it and appreciate it.  Physical discs can also prevent piracy, and that keeps the video game industry from falling apart.  Physical games prevent the need for massive fail safe hard drives and excessive bandwidth usage, which means less money for the consumer.  Physical packaging for an otherwise digital experience includes something physical which most people value more than the cost to create it.  Physical packaging allows publishers to effectively market and protect the product.

The idea of digital games replacing physical is a myth, because not only is it unnecessary, it's not even an attractive alternative for most of the consumers or the game makers.  It's a digital dork fantasy.  Game makers are making downloadable content to increase the life of games, not to replace the physical package.  People on the fringe will do things like download video games and order from the supermarket online, but most of us have little problem with how it works right now, and we are highly unlikely to have a problem with it ten years from now.  Many people are over-thinking this one.  All parties are incentivized to stick with what works.  Digital downloading will become more prevalent when some discounts are finally offered for downloading, but will certainly not significantly cut into physical packaging - not unless the whole industry is about to go down in flames.  There's just nothing wrong with going to a movie theater, or buying a video game at a store.

Disclosure: long GME